When the insomniast is ready to pay this double price of love to God and love to man for the peace that passeth understanding and that also bringeth sleep, he is ready for Emmanuel treatment. Seated in the Morris chair before the smouldering fire with curtains drawn, he is taught to relax his muscles, the cortical layer of the brain is quieted by soothing suggestions, and then standing behind the chair the Emmanuel worker begins the treatment somewhat thus in a low monotone:

You are now relaxed in body and quieted in mind. You are to let your thoughts languidly follow mine expressed in words. Do not offer any mental opposition. I shall say nothing which your mind will not instinctively accept and cherish.

Fix your thoughts on God. Think of Him not alone as the All-Father but also as the Universal Mind in which your mind exists exactly as each individual thought floats in your mind. Think of Him not merely as your Heavenly Father but also as the Universal Spirit on which your soul depends for every breath of spiritual life, just as your body is dependent for its every breath of physical existence on the air you breathe. Believe that in this larger, higher, truer sense, “In Him we live and move and have our being.”

Now Universal Mind or Universal Spirit is wholesomeness and love, harmony and power. Realise that when your soul breathes in the atmosphere in which it lives it breathes in wholesomeness and love, harmony and power. But it is possible, in the exercise of the free will with which you are in the nature of the case endowed, to fill up the soul with morbidness and selfishness, disunity and weakness, so that there is no room in it for God’s wholesomeness and love, His harmony and power.

You do not sleep because you are “all replete with very Thou.” You have filled up your soul with thoughts of self, or thoughts of others from the point of view of self. You have worried when you should have cast your care on Him; “for He careth for you.” You have yielded to all sorts of foolish fears, forgetful that “perfect love casteth out fear.” You have been self-centred, though God Himself was so far centred out of self that “He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

In the silence of this quiet hour put your worries and your fears away and swing your centre out of self. Open wide the windows of your soul and let the Spirit in of wholesomeness and love, of harmony and power. Believe the Spirit will come in. Interpret in the terms of Spirit those veracious words of Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”

Wait for the incoming Spirit. Wait in faith and confidence. Remember that “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.”

With your mind filled with the Spirit of wholesomeness and love, of harmony and power, it will be at rest; it will know the peace that passeth understanding. All nerve-strain will go. Sleep will come to-night. Sleep will come to-morrow night. Sleep will come every night. Sound sleep, re-creating sleep so long denied you, will be yours at last. The day will never know again its feverish inquietude. Work will have its zest, and play its joy. The silent night will lose its morbid fancies and its horrid nightmares, and you will each morning wake with the song upon your lips:

You have done with sleeplessness forever. You go out from this room beneath the rooftree of God’s sanctuary, a new creature in Christ Jesus. Claim your new privilege in Jesus’ name. Act henceforth on the comforting assurance that you are to go to sleep as soon as you have gone to bed, and sleep the whole night through.

Keep by day as well as night the serenity you here have found. Awake with the morning light into the thoughts of this first treatment. Keep them in the background of your consciousness the whole day through. Take a few minutes every day to go into the silence as you now are, and think these thoughts again in proper sequence. Take them up into your heart and brood upon them all the day. Work them into the warp and woof of your inmost soul so that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature” shall be able to separate you from them. Make them yours and keep them yours forever and forever. And you shall sleep the sleep of the quiet mind and the God-filled soul in all the years to come.14